With a $7 Billion Expansion Under Way, the School Offers a Perk to Its Neighbors

Columbia University is only a few blocks from the Harlem public school where Allyson Chavez spent her high-school years. But to her and her schoolmates, she said, the Ivy League institution often seemed little more than a steadily encroaching foreign entity where few, if any of them, would end up.

“It sort of seems like Columbia is this big bully trying to build more and more in Harlem,” she said of the school’s reputation in the...